Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

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Martin Jähnert

Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (May 2017-May 2019)

In his PhD project Martin Jähnert studies the development of the correspondence principle in the old quantum theory as a process of adaptive reformulation. By looking at different uses of the principle the project aims to understand how physicists came to work with the principle and how the principle was shaped through its applications. The project studies this process of adaptive reformulation in the context of the dispersion of the correspondence principle throughout the networks of the old quantum theory and its simultaneous transfer into different fields of research (e.g. atomic and molecular spectroscopy, dispersion, and collision processes). Thereby Jähnert shows how the principle became one of the most fruitful research tools of the old quantum theory.

In previous work with Christoph Lehner, Martin Jähnert has studied the early debates on the interpretation of quantum mechanics and its interplay with the development of the theory. From this perspective, the interpretational debate was understood as a reflection on the role of pictures and models within the research process. Their work aimed to clarify how physicists dealt with the methodological and epistemological challenges arising from the development of quantum mechanics.

Jähnert, M. (2015). Practising the correspondence principle in the old quantum theory: Franck, Hund and the Ramsauer effect. In F. Aaserud, & H. Kragh (Eds.), One hundred years of the Bohr atom: proceedings from a conference (pp. 200-216)…